Black Eyed Peas show combines futurism with old-fashioned showbiz

First came the beams of light, each one tracing an ellipse on the stage.

Still as statues, dressed in robot gear, the four Black Eyed Peas emerged from trapdoors at the start of their Wednesday night concert at the Prudential Center in Newark. Soon, the set turned into a gigantic motherboard, with flashes of computer green dancing across its diodes. Acrobats in white, each with replica speakers attached to their limbs, became gyrating stereos. Later, rapper Taboo took a ride on a neon-lit motorcycle, suspended by cables high above the floor.

The reference to the movie “Tron” was unmistakable. The Black Eyed Peas were digitally generated characters caught in a mainframe big enough to contain the entire arena.

But for all the sci-fi trappings of this tour (which also comes to Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City on Saturday), much of the show felt reassuringly analog. This was an old-fashioned variety show, a digital vaudeville only thinly disguised by the jaw-dropping spectacle.

Each Pea took an extended turn in the spotlight, with a distinctly different approach to entertaining the packed house. Fergie, for instance, crooned upbeat pop-rock radio hits (“Glamorous,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry”). apl.de.ap, who is Filipino-American, sang in Tagalog. will.i.am stopped the set cold to perform an extended deejay set on a rotating — and levitating — platform.

The dance routines, too, were backward-looking. They owed more to Fosse-style Broadway choreography than to contemporary music videos. The Peas interacted with their dancers, and each other, like musical theater performers, acting out the scenarios of the songs. When Fergie sang, in “Don’t Phunk With My Love,” about a boyfriend who had her “by a string,” she pulled on a silver cord attached to will.i.am’s pants. They held that pose, mugging for the audience, all robotic pretenses momentarily dropped.

Fergie, the Peas’ true star, never completely assumed the android persona, anyway. She’s too affable and earthy to be a computer projection. While will.i.am excited the crowd by proxy, spinning guaranteed crowd-pleasers like “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” and “Thriller” during his long deejay set, she went straight for the throat, applying her powerful voice to material that is occasionally unworthy of her talent. (Consider, for instance, “My Humps,” a brain-dead rhyme about her “lovely lady lumps” that anticipated Ke$ha’s worst excesses by five years.) She could be screechy on the high notes, but usually stuck the landing, and appeared to be having so much fun onstage that it was difficult not to cheer for her.

The crowd was given few opportunities to applaud her accompanists. The backing musicians played atop a towering bandstand; for much of the show, they were obscured by a translucent curtain. Audience attention was directed to the video screens, the four Peas and the dancers — anywhere but on the instrumentalists. The separation accomplished what it set out to do, but was a tactical error, making the Black Eyed Peas feel dangerously disconnected from their own music.

It also misrepresented the act. will.i.am is an imaginative pop producer and multi-instrumentalist with a hyperactive style that has been in demand by recording artists looking to storm the charts. He has worked with respected rappers like Nas and the Game. While his sonic arrangements for the Peas bow toward childlike simplicity, they contain plenty of ear candy for grownups, too.

The future portrayed in this show was a curiously safe one: long on spectacle and wonder, but short on intrigue. There was, however, one breathtaking production number that demonstrated that there are more genuine smarts to the Black Eyed Peas’ artificial intelligence than “Let’s Get It Started” and “My Humps” suggested. This was the show’s encore: “Boom Boom Pow.”

will.i.am’s digitally altered production was legitimately trippy, and the dancers were dressed in full-body suits (no faces were visible) covered in black-and-white mazes. Then replicas of the dancers were projected on the screen behind the performers. The human labyrinth was unsettling. It was also hypnotic, and seemed to contain a riddle about the interplay between humanity and technology that the rest of the sci-fi-inspired show refused to hint at. For all their Saturday-morning-cartoon appeal, the Peas have the talent and imagination to grow up in a hurry.
The Black Eyed Peas, with T-Pain